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Light Fixtures: Go Into the Dark at Western Bridge

Painting and photography often claim to be about light. The current exhibit at Western Bridge takes this idea to its literal end, in an exhibit featuring light bulbs, neon tubing, and the flash of sunlight through an automated curtain. Light in Darkness, housed in collectors Bill and Ruth True’s expansive private exhibition space in SoDo, has been designed without incidental lighting devices. One piece of art illuminates another, putting the art to use as light fixtures, while adding an undeniable sense of playfulness and accessibility to the work itself. Yes, that light bulb on the floor is a piece of art and yes, part of its job is to light itself so you can see it in the darkened gallery. You’ve got to let your vision adjust to the environment.

Light is how we see the world: the colors we perceive are those which are reflected back at us. Light declares the mood of a scene, and, in the way that J.M.W. Turner’s Romantic paintings glorified natural light, artist’s depictions of light are a way to praise the natural world. Instead of using other media to portray this most basic perceptive substance—for light is particle, remember—the works on view at Western Bridge use light as a medium in itself.

Architect Roy McMakin’s enormous front window wears a black curtain that is pulled open and shut. Operated on a timer, this is Martin Creed’s Work No. 990 (A curtain opening and closing). The motion of the oversize drapes provides a repeat dose of natural light into the gallery, as all the remaining sources of natural light have been sealed off. Creed’s slo-mo curtain, big as it is, is a bit of a joke, because of its vast size: the small gesture of opening the curtain has been made grand. One looks not at the window, of course, but outside: the sky in all its changeability is the view here. You’ll also notice Berlin-based Michael Sailsorfer’s iron-dipped ceramic light bulbs, hanging outside the gallery. These bulbs are leaden-colored, heavy and opaque: dark.

“It was just dumb luck,” says gallery director Eric Fredericksen, “the way this work is charged and revealed by the curtain opening and closing, a leftover from the previous show.” As the title alludes, there’s not much dark matter in Thompson’s view, for this piece inverts the proportion of light to dark. Maybe Thomson is taking a critical look at our artificially bright night skies, which are said to confuse the circadian rhythms of both animals and humans. Or, if there is no dark matter, then we’ve seen it all, and there’s no room for mystery.

Just inside the gallery’s front door, a video of a light bulb is projected onto an actual light bulb suspended from the ceiling. This is …Um, by Canadian-born, Berlin-based multi-media collaborators Hadley+Maxwell (Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens). The video depicts a swinging bulb, slowing to stillness. The bulb flashes on and off, and it’s unclear if the light is emitted from the video of the bulb, or from the glass bulb itself. The light and shadow are both real, of course, but one shadow is projected in the video, while the other is cast by the light from the video passing through the physical bulb. The bulb itself does not turn on, but is made to appear as it if does by light passing through it. It’s a trick, and one cannot help but think of that cartoon cliché: an idea represented by a light bulb switching on. Here, the flash of inspiration is manipulated, replicated, and falsified.

The swaying light bulb seems to possess its own sound track, like a repeat beat of a metronome. It’s the snapping on and off of the electrical transformer nearby, a side effect of Martin Creed’s Work No. 312, A lamp going on and off, upstairs. The sound is out of time to the bulb’s sway, and the ticking power supply is revealed as coincidental noise. Like many of the overlappings and intersections between the works here, it’s a happy accident that works to fool the senses, at least at first.

In an exhibit that feels both empty and packed full—with twenty-three pieces on the exhibition list—most of the works in this show are stunners. That said, the least interesting piece is upstairs in the back room: a star-shaped, plastic-looking trinket suspended within metal rings. Olafur Eliasson’s Super Star feels like a glinting pastel-colored toy or an overgrown New Age Christmas ornament. It’s got the whole room to itself, perhaps because all the other art is too smart to talk to it.

Eliasson’s second work in this exhibit, Neon Ripple, is much stronger. When it was shown here in 2005, Regina Hackett described it in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, as a “large, upside down hot-plate.” Her description is apt: a series of concentric, white, neon rings light, one after the next, creating a ripple of illumination. In the large main gallery, you stand beneath Neon Ripple to observe it, as it hangs flat against the ceiling. (Previously, it hung against a wall.) Neon Ripple reads like a low-tech chandelier set on repeat.

The neon works are the strongest in the show. The text piece, Jeppe Hein’s See Listen Taste Feel is a series of those four commanding verbs, spelled out in white, all-caps lettering, installed high up on the wall. These sense terms are rendered in block-letter, boring font, but the glow they cast, and the power of the terms themselves, thrumming white in the dark room, is striking. There is an emotional power in the plain text that is surprising.

Across from Hein’s neon hangs Claude Zervas’s loopy, delicate florescent tubes. Elba is thread-thin like electric lace. This sculpture has been shown repeatedly, at the Tacoma Art Museum and at James Harris Gallery, and previously at Western Bridge as well. It’s strong piece, with all its wires showing, like an old car revealing its mechanical secrets to all who care to pop the hood. Somehow, Zervas’s piece is made stronger by the darkness surrounding it. The gallery is cool, and his cold cathode lamps are hotter in the dark. Here (like in so many of the other works) the art piece gets to do its work at illumination, not just as a bonus feature in a well-lit gallery, but by providing the light necessaryto see the work itself.

On the floor is a process piece whose idea is more interesting that its execution. To create NYC-based artist Jason Dodge’s piece, Eric Fredericksen and Bill True went out and removed every source of light from a remote cabin. This explanation is in the descriptor of this piece, which is named Darkness falls on the Kelly Cabin, Hwy 09, Copalis Beach, WA 98535. On the floor lies a loose pile of what was recovered: a scatter of light bulbs in various shapes and sizes, heating coils from an electric stove, as well as firewood and newspaper. Because the size of the main gallery, and the low light, these bulbs are dark and in danger of being stepped on. The rest of the many bulbs in the exhibit (with the exception of Sailsorfer’s outdoor bulbs) are lit; these bulbs are decommissioned, fragile, and vulnerable. Instead of providing hot illumination, they are cold objects.

There are many more works to talk about in this show, including three more videos: an old toy camera being captured by a high-tech scientific film camera, a man brushing his teeth in red LED (which I want to find more sexy than I do), and the flow of blue water projected onto one high corner. The strongest work in color is Brooklyn-based Spencer Finch’s neon piece, The Light at Lascaux (Cave Entrance) Sept 29, 2005 5:27 p.m. This most famous of scenes, where the first cave paintings were discovered, is rendered as a diagonal line of colorful neon tubes, with rectangles of color repeated over and over. The pattern is reminiscent of a printer’s test strip (magenta, cyan, and yellow), or the color bars that used to appear at the end of TV shows, or late at night when television used to cause broadcasting. (A shocking idea now.) Fredericksen explained that The Light at Lascaux was not meant to be looked at directly, but regarded as the glow cast on the opposite wall. In a show of predominantly monochrome works, this room is pink and teal and brown, warm with both color and heat.

Dark Room Trio, a dance piece performed in darkness, and viewed through night vision goggles, was also part of this show. First staged in 2006, choreographer Crispin Spaeth’s performance was recast as part of this exhibit, for it aligned so well with the theme of light in dark. Seated in two long rows of beanbag chairs, facing each other, the audience watches a love triangle unfold: a lone male dancer moves first in partnership with one female dancer, and then the other. The dancers navigate in complete darkness, though their movements feel surprisingly confident. It’s an intimate performance, exploring issues of trust in relationship, as well as that of the dancers themselves, whose blind physical safety is entrusted to the stillness and quiet of the audience. The correlation between this dance and the rest of the exhibit is clear, as the audience is put to work in the act of creating the dance by looking at it. A light bulb might not be a work of art unless it is looked at as such, right?

These are the kinds of questions that Western Bridge has been raising, over and over, since it opened in 2004. As a private space, Western Bridge has featured both internationally known artists (such Roni Horn and Jenny Holzer) as well as helping to propel local artists to an international stage (Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen come to mind). It’s still unclear what the Trues will do with this grand venue, after Western Bridge’s planned closing next spring. Seattle will miss this world-class art collection, as well as the chance to see some of the True’s stunning works presented over and over again in varying contexts.

“We are trying to be conscious of what it means to close Western Bridge, for us and for the city and for the people we know that Western Bridge has been important to,” Fredericksen explains. “How do we do that? Do we lock the door and walk away or do we try to do more?”

In a time of so much upheaval, in economics and politics, locally and internationally, it seems almost backwards to consider change anything other than necessary and inevitable. Western Bridge’s closing is already being mourned, as this institution is like no other in the city. It is a grand, grand space, and the Trues have been generous in providing programming that might not have happened in any other situation.

Perhaps Shakespeare put it best, here: “Light seeking light, doth light of lights beguile; so ere you find where light in darkness lies, your light grows darkness by losing of your eyes.” The inventory card for Light in Darkness is printed with this line from Love’s Labor’s Lost (act one, scene one). Perhaps one way to interpret this quote is like this: Don’t read too hard, don’t strain your eyes, as eyestrain causes blindness: i.e., enjoy the show for what it is. (This might go for the gallery, too.)

“When we think only of things closing, we forget about things opening,” Fredericksen remarks. “It does seem, right now, that more things are closing than are opening, but I think that should give impetus to people to try new projects.”

Western Bridge may be going dark in the not-so-distant future, but this exhibit Light in Darkness, closes this Saturday. Go, see the light, and stand in a vast dark room lit with neon.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.